Jim’s Guest Blog and an Excerpt from Arab Voices

After decades spent trying to better explain the Arab World to other Americans, all too often I have found myself running up against the same mythologies and half-truths that, year after year, stubbornly maintain an alarming ability to shape thinking about the region.

One of the reasons I wrote Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us and Why It Matters was to challenge these myths head on. Unlike so many other books or articles that have been written about this region, Arab Voices is neither a retelling (or an interpretation) of history, nor is it a collection of personal anecdotes. These approaches can be useful, and there are excellent examples that have made real contributions to our understanding. But they are also susceptible to bias or to what I call “bad science” – as in the case of writers with a penchant for elevating an observation or a conversation into a generalized conclusion (the musings of Tom Friedman comes to mind).Read more.